a. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to interactive and enhanced television and, more particularly, to a method and system of creating enhancement content that may be displayed in conjunction with a television program.
b. Description of the Background
A television program may be accompanied by additional information employed to enhance the program or to provide viewer interaction. Enhancements have historically included closed captioning and multilingual support. Advances in networking, computer systems, and video production have increased the number and types of enhancements that may be provided with a program or advertisement . Enhancements may include stock updates, news stories, Internet links, weather forecasts, bulletins, statistics, trivia, and other information. For example, a football game may include icons allowing viewing of team players, statistics, trivia and other information such as upcoming games. Further, the advent of set-top-boxes, as may be used in cable and satellite television systems, allows enhancement information to be presented in new ways, such as screen overlays and in windows, for example.
Enhanced television content may employ a combination of HTML (hypertext markup language), JavaScript, Java and other formats common to Internet page display. An enhanced display may comprise text, icons, graphics and images placed at locations on or in proximity to the television image. To produce an enhanced display, an author must create a file identifying each displayed element (such as text, icons, graphics and images), the location where each element is displayed, and the starting time a duration for which an element or group of elements is displayed. Previous methods employed to enter parameters required to generate and position the elements comprising the layout of enhanced pages have involved manually entry. The resultant application program may require compilation and execution in order to view the resultant image or images. This may be an iterative process, requiring multiple compilations before a desired result is obtained. Such iterative processes may be costly and time consuming.
Additionally, due to the numerous differences between presentation platforms, such as set top boxes, satellite receivers, computers, or interactive televisions, content providers have historically been required to target a specific platform in the development of an application. In order to provide support for each additional platform, the interactive content provider must introduce potentially significant modifications to the existing application, resulting in the ongoing maintenance of multiple code bases and adding to the time and cost required to produce enhanced page layouts for multiple platforms. Further, web page design tools, such as FrontPage(trademark), DreamWeaver(trademark), and others, do not support administrative capabilities nor do they support databases. Therefore a new method of creating enhanced content that allows utilization across multiple platforms and provides an accurate preview of enhancements is needed.
The present invention overcomes the disadvantages and limitations of the prior art by providing an interactive television enhancement authoring method and system allowing simple development of text, graphics, and image display, emulation of the enhancements, and production of a platform independent enhancement file, called iTVML, that may be parsed, using a publisher tool (such as iTV Publisher from Intellocity), to create interactive television enhanced content files specific to a particular platform such as WEBTV(trademark), AOLTV(trademark) or other platforms. An authoring program communicates with a web browser such that the present invention may be utilized locally or across a network.
The invention may therefore comprise a method for creating a television presentation enhancement comprising: defining a window in a graphical user interface; placing a displayable element at a position in the window; defining a time when the displayable element may be rendered; employing a database to store information describing the displayable element and the time; creating a platform independent television enhancement file containing information related to the displayable element and the time; parsing the platform independent television enhancement file to produce an HTML file; and viewing the HTML file.
Software downloaded to the browser provides xe2x80x98drag and dropxe2x80x99 and resizing editing functions at the user""s browser, eliminating delays that may be incurred due network latencies and server workload if these functions were implemented at the server. The invention comprises a number of user screens that may be accessed through URLs that provide administrative, project, page, layout, trigger, emulation, and iTVML export. Administrative functions provide user accounts, login, and tutorials. The project and page screens provide access to projects and specific enhancement pages with the projects. The layout page provides an easy to use, user-friendly graphical editing environment where elements such as text, graphics, images, and executable routines may be placed on a video display area (canvas) and may be moved and sized. The trigger functions provide synchronization of the presentation of enhancements to a specified event, such as frame time or presentation duration, for example. The emulation function generates an iTVML file and parses the file for web browser presentation, providing an accurate representation of the enhancement if viewed on a television. The iTVML export function provides generation and saving of an iTVML file.
The invention may therefore further comprise a system for creating television enhancements comprising: a graphical user interface implemented in a web browser environment; a rectangular area defined in the browser environment; a user interface that places a displayable element in the rectangular area; a user interface that specifies a time at which the displayable element may be rendered; a database that stores information associated with the displayable element and information associated with the time; a pointing device; and a user interface that initiates generation of an XML file containing tags for the information associated with the displayable element and the information associated with the time.
Advantageously, the present invention provides an efficient, easy to use system and method for creating television enhancements that produces a platform independent enhancement file. The enhancement file may be emulated using the invention to preview the appearance of the enhancements. The enhancement file may be parsed by other tools to produce platform dependent enhancement files without re-editing, resulting in lower costs to support a range of presentation platforms, and uniformity in the content of the enhancements provided.